"I Got My Orange Crush"

So I was watching Die Hard last night, and several aspects of the movie amused the historian in me. A lot of the things that movie got away with in 1988 seem very anachronistic to us now, and are throwbacks of a more innocent time, if the term "innocent" can be applied to the decade that featured Prince and hair metal.

Three things in particular caught my attention--Bruce Willis's character was allowed onto a plane with a gun (regardless of the fact that he's a cop, no one in today's society would be allowed to board a plane with anything even close to a weapon), he was smoking in the airport (a definite no-no now), and the bad guys were eastern European/German (and West German at that).

It's nuances like that which point to how much has changed in the last decade and a half, especially since the turn of the new century. As much as I hate to use this phrase, since 9/11, things have really changed. The changes have been subtle in a lot of cases--we don't realize just how different things were in the 1980s or even the 1990s until we are presented with something that wouldn't have even caused anyone to bat an eye back then (Willis is able to dismiss concern over his gun by saying, "Don't worry, I'm a cop," which the man accepts without hesitation). Had Willis's character tried something like that today, he'd have been busy getting a full cavity search in a windowless room somewhere in the airport.

It's also interesting to note that the bad guys were mostly European. There was not a single Arab or Middle-Eastern character among them. This was still before the Berlin Wall fell, mind you, and before we'd realized that Communism was all but dead. The bad guys were still European militants, not Muslim ones. I'd be interested to see how the movie would have been different if it were made today rather than in 1988.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Regular Joes, "Samsonite Blues"